Nobel Prizes and Laureates

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1923
Frederick G. Banting, John Macleod

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John Macleod - Biographical

John James Rickard
Macleod was born on September 6, 1876 at Cluny, near Dunkeld,
Perthshire, Scotland. He was the son of the Rev. Robert Macleod.
When later the family moved to Aberdeen, Macleod went to the
Grammar School there and later entered the Marischal College of
the University
of Aberdeen to study medicine.

In 1898 he took his medical degree with honours and was awarded
the Anderson Travelling Fellowship, which enabled him to work for
a year at the Institute for Physiology at the University of
Leipzig.

In 1899 he was appointed Demonstrator of Physiology at the London
Hospital Medical School under Professor Leonard Hill and in 1902
he was appointed Lecturer in Biochemistry at the same College. In
that year he was awarded the McKinnon Research Studentship of the
Royal Society, which he held until 1903, when he was appointed
Professor of Physiology at the Western Reserve University at Cleveland,
Ohio, U.S.A.

During his tenure of this post he was occupied by various war
duties and acted, for part of the winter session of 1916, as
Professor of Physiology at McGill University, Montreal.

In 1918 he was elected Professor of Physiology at the University of
Toronto, Canada. Here he was Director of the Physiological
Laboratory and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Medicine.

In 1928 he was appointed Regius Professor of Physiology at the
University of Aberdeen, a post which he held, together with that
of Consultant Physiologist to the Rowett Institute
for Animal Nutrition, in spite of failing health, until his early
death.

Macleod's name will always be associated with his work on
carbohydrate metabolism and especially with his collaboration
with Frederick Banting and Charles Best
in the discovery of insulin. For this work on the discovery of
insulin, in 1921, Banting and Macleod were jointly awarded the
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for 1923.

Macleod had, before this discovery, been interested in
carbohydrate metabolism and especially in diabetes since 1905 and
he had published some 37 papers on carbohydrate metabolism and 12
papers on experimentally produced glycosuria. Previously he had
followed the earlier great work of von Mering and Minkowski,
which has been published in 1889, and although he believed that
the pancreas was the organ involved, he had not been able to
prove exactly what part it played. Although Laguesse had
suggested, in 1893, that the islets of Langerhans possibly
produced an internal secretion which controlled the metabolism of
sugar, and Sharpey-Schafer had, in 1916, called this hypothetical
substance "insuline", nobody had been able to prove its actual
existence. Others had made extracts of the pancreas, some of
which had proved to be active in affecting the metabolism of
sugar, but none of these products had been found reliable, until
Banting and Best, jointly with Macleod, could announce their
great discovery in February 1922. The process of manufacturing
the pancreatic extract which could be used for the treatment of
human patients was patented; the financial proceeds of the patent
were given to the British Medical Research Council for the
Encouragement of Research, the discoverers receiving no payment
at all. Subsequently, the active principle of these earlier
pancreatic extracts, insulin, was isolated in pure form by John
Jacob Abel in 1926, and eventually it became available as a
manufactured product.

Earlier, in 1908, Macleod had done experimental work on the
possible part played by the central nervous system in the
causation of hyperglycaemia and in 1932 he returned to this
subject, basing his work on the experiments done by Claude
Bernard on puncture diabetes, and Macleod then concluded, from
experiments done on rabbits, that stimulation of gluconeogenesis
in the liver occurred by way of the parasympathetic nervous
system.

Macleod also did much work in fields other than carbohydrate
metabolism. His first paper, published in 1899, when he was
working at the London Hospital, had been on the phosphorus
content of muscle and he also worked on air sickness, electric
shock, purine bases, the chemistry of the tubercle bacillus and
the carbamates.

In addition he wrote 11 books and monographs, among which were
his Recent Advances in Physiology (with Sir Leonard Hill)
(1905); Physiology and Biochemistry of Modern Medicine,
which had reached its 9th edition in 1941; Diabetes: its
Pathological Physiology (1925); Carbohydrate Metabolism
and Insulin (1926); and his Vanuxem lectures, published in
1928 as the Fuel of Life.

In 1919 Macleod was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,
in 1923 of the Royal Society, London, in 1930 of the Royal College
of Physicians, London, and in 1932 of the Royal Society
of Edinburgh. During 1921-1923 he was President of the
American Physiological Society, and during 1925-1926 of the Royal
Canadian Institute. He held honorary doctorates of the
Universities of Toronto, Cambridge, Aberdeen and Pennsylvania, the
Western Reserve University and the Jefferson
Medical College. He was an honorary fellow of the Accademia
Medica, Rome, and also a corresponding member of the Medical and
Surgical Society, Bologna, the Societá Medica Chirurgica,
Rome, and the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher
Leopoldina, Halle, and Foreign Associate Fellow of the
College of
Physicians, Philadelphia.

Macleod was a very successful teacher and director of research.
His lucid lectures were delivered in an attractive manner and his
pupils and research associates found him a sympathetic and
stimulating worker, who demanded exact work and the humility that
was a feature of his character. He would not tolerate careless
work. He was much interested in the development of medical
education and especially in the introduction of scientific
methods of investigation into clinical work.

Outside the laboratory he was keenly interested in golf and
gardening and the arts, especially painting. A sensitive, loyal
and affectionate man of engaging personality, his serene spirit
met with courage and optimism the painful and crippling
disabilities which troubled the final years of his busy
life.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and first
published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel.
It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.